What is Ride with GPS?
Ride with GPS is a route planner first and a ride tracker second, which is exactly why so many people run it alongside Strava rather than instead of it. You draw the route on the web planner, then send it to a Garmin Edge, a Wahoo ELEMNT BOLT/ROAM/ACE, a Hammerhead Karoo, a COROS watch, a Bryton, or your phone, and ride it with turn-by-turn voice cues. Strava keeps the feed, the segments and the training history; Ride with GPS handles the part where you have to know which way to turn.
The Strava connection is one-way and narrower than most people expect. Once you link the accounts, rides you record in the Ride with GPS mobile app and GPS files you upload by hand get pushed to Strava automatically. Nothing comes back: Ride with GPS's own help docs state that the sync will not pull data from Strava, so your Strava routes, activities and back catalogue stay put. Activities that arrive in Ride with GPS from a connected device account — Garmin Connect, Wahoo, Hammerhead, COROS — are explicitly excluded from the Strava push, on the reasonable assumption that those devices already upload to Strava themselves.
Three details catch people out. The sync only starts working after you connect, so older rides never backfill. The connection can take up to 24 hours to establish, and rides recorded inside that window may not go across. And uploaded activities inherit your Strava privacy settings, not your Ride with GPS ones. The company has been at this since 2007, out of Portland, Oregon.
Key Features
A web route planner with real editing tools
Drawing and saving routes on the website works on the free Starter account. The tools that make replanning quick — automatic bike-friendly directions, joining multiple routes together, one-click Change Start, custom route colours, advanced map layers — sit behind Basic and Premium respectively. Saving a customised copy of someone else's route needs Basic.
Turn-by-turn voice navigation (paid)
Audible and visual cues, off-course warnings, and directions that keep coming through a locked screen. This is the single most common reason people upgrade, and it is not in the free tier: you need Basic or Premium.
Offline Maps (paid)
Download a region and every route in your library inside that region becomes available offline, including the RWGPS Cycle basemap, the all-time global heatmap and MTB Trail Ratings. Individual Offline Route downloads still exist. You still can't plan a new route without a connection — the planner needs the network even when the map is on your phone.
Send to Device works on the free account
Pin a route, or hit Send to Device, and it syncs wirelessly to a Garmin Edge (via Garmin Connect), Wahoo ELEMNT, Hammerhead Karoo, or COROS. Bryton is set up from the Bryton Active app and pulls your public routes. Ride with GPS's own FAQ is blunt about it: Send to Device works with a free Starter account; voice navigation and offline maps don't.
Device sync runs inbound, not outbound
Garmin, Wahoo, Hammerhead and COROS all push recorded activities one way into Ride with GPS. Garmin can also backfill up to five years of history if you enable it. Ride with GPS does not send your activities back out to Garmin Connect, and Garmin courses don't come in.
Live Logging
Share a live location and a running ETA that responds to your current pace, so someone at home can see where you actually are. Basic and up.
Apple Watch app
Installs automatically with the iPhone app on watchOS 9 or later. Navigate from your wrist with haptic cues, or leave the phone behind entirely and record standalone with the watch's heart rate.
Who It's For
- Cyclists who plan before they ride and want the route on a head unit rather than improvised at junctions
- Bikepackers and backcountry riders who need a map that still works in airplane mode, and will pay for it
- Club and event riders handed a Ride with GPS link who still want the finished ride to land on Strava
- Anyone whose bike computer already uploads to Strava — in that case Ride with GPS is your planner, and the Strava connection is redundant
